I recently came across this article (http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/12/the-la-tech-scene-finally-moves-out-of-its-parents-basement/) which is mainly focussing on the Los Angeles Tech Scene. In the authors opinion the silicon valley is facing a competitive future. I absolutely agree with him except that it is not only LA taht is on the raise but also Germanies capital Berlin. Berlin hosts a lot of european startups, is a very good place to live for young, creative people and already have it’s “own” venture capital network.

What I find interesting most is the list of supporters Michael Carney has at the very end of his article:

Stuck in a geeks world.. What does it mean? Actually there are “10” different characters that are not easy to seperate for the rest of the wolrd: Geeks and Nerds. But what’s the actual difference? An Infographic compiled by http://www.mastersinit.org/ is explaining how to seperate them.

While Geeks are more likley to be found in positions like web developers or Entrepreneurs, Nerds are more often working as rocket scientists or reclusive professors. Both are likely to be IT professionals.

Whenever I think of gaming, I think of board games, card game as well as computer and console games first. Most game involve more than just one character and even those who can be played on your own are more fun being played with a friend. Social interaction is a common element in almost all kinds of gaming, so it is obvious that social media should have a big impact on gaming.

Prism Casino took a look at Facebook user satisfaction scores to come up with a top ten list of favorite social games to compile an infographic. Casinos, hidden objects and role-playing games top the list of favorite styles, passing trivia games like “Trivial Pursuit,” word games like “Scrabble,” and strategy games like chess that are very popular offline. The “Scrabble”-style game “Words With Friends” is on there, but in terms of actual usage, “FarmVille,” “Mafia Wars” and “Bejeweled Blitz” remain the top three social games played in the US and UK.

Last year I successfully attended “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” bay Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Sebastian and Peter are pioneers on the field of free online education and gave an awesome experience to a lot of online students.

A few days ago I received this Email from Sebastian asking to promote his latest venture udacity:

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your interest in AI Class and congratulations to those who
successfully graduated. We were totally amazed that over 23,000 students
made it all the way to the end in a Stanford graduate-level class.

Due to popular demand, we are teaching a follow-up class: AI for Robotics at www.udacity.com . Also due to popular demand, we now have a programming environment, so you can develop and test software. Our
goal is to teach you to program a self-driving car in 7 weeks. This is a topic very close to my heart, and I am eager to share it with you. (This class builds on the concepts in ai-class, but ai-class is NOT required).

We are also launching an introduction to programming class, where students will learn to program a search engine, without any prior
knowledge of programming. This will be great for students new to computer science.

We are doing this with a new university: Udacity. In the next months, we will offer an entire computer science curriculum through Udacity, and offer certification services so that an entire degree can be obtained online.

I would love to see you in class again! I would also love if you could help us spread the word and recruit students. Udacity is an experiment in democratizing education, in making free education available for
everyone in the world. It can only succeed if you join us and help spread the word.

Sebastian

If you want to learn how to build your own search engine or how to build a robotic car, just register for the corresponing course on udacity.com.

Usually graffiti artist are recognizedas vandals disturbing the world clean look with their Art. They are not known for being the smartest folks. But this view may change in a few days.

David Choe paintings at Facebooks first headquarter may be woth north of $200M in a few days without being sold. How this works?

The Artist took stock for paintings at the company’s headquarters instead of cash. His payout may be $200 million by Facebook IPO. Some other investors, especially the early ones, may even make billions of dollars.

Taking stocks may be one of the smartest move in terms of early art valuation in history. Other than regular artists of his guild do, the Choe had a bright foresight or may he just was the lucky winner of a smart bet.

When Google went to market with its $1.67 billion I.P.O. in 2004, hundreds of people joined the millionaire ranks, including secretaries, a company masseuse and a company chef. This time you can also count in a modern-day renegade artist who uses to put up party pics of himself spending enormous amounts of money on alcohol on his facebook page. Just recently he promoted photos of a $40.000 bottle of alcohol; a single shot is $888, much more than I sent on drinks for a whole party crowd usualy

Alphabet Soup was by far the easiest problem in the qualifiers. I am not talking implementation but about understanding the problem. In some cases the “problem designers” did a good job in confusing me for at least an hour by their style in description. In alphabet soup’s case the problem was formulated as follows:

Alfredo Spaghetti really likes soup, especially when it contains alphabet pasta. Every day he constructs a sentence from letters, places the letters into a bowl of broth and enjoys delicious alphabet soup.

Today, after constructing the sentence, Alfredo remembered that the Facebook Hacker Cup starts today! Thus, he decided to construct the phrase “HACKERCUP”. As he already added the letters to the broth, he is stuck with the letters he originally selected. Help Alfredo determine how many times he can place the word “HACKERCUP” side-by-side using the letters in his soup.

Input

The first line of the input file contains a single integer T: the number of test cases. T lines follow, each representing a single test case with a sequence of upper-case letters and spaces: the original sentence Alfredo constructed.

Output

Output T lines, one for each test case. For each case, output “Case #t: n”, where t is the test case number (starting from 1) and n is the number of times the word “HACKERCUP” can be placed side-by-side using the letters from the sentence.

Constraints

1 < T ≤ 20

Sentences contain only the upper-case letters A-Z and the space character

Each sentence contains at least one letter, and contains at most 1000 characters, including spaces

To solve it, simply iterate through the characters in the string, counting how frequently each of them occurs.

Get seated, ready, steady.. GO. There is another annual hacking cup coming. I already pointed to the Facebook Hacker Cup a few days ago. Now it is time to announce that also Google is doing it’s annual contest in 2012.

I just came across a very new site called tubalr.com A few minutes after checking it out I was addicted. Tublar is absolutely and easy to use, clear design fully working pandora for youtube. It’s creator Cody Steward writes: “Tubalr allows you to effortlessly listen to a band’s or artist’s top YouTube videos without all the clutter YouTube brings.”

Facebook is starting its second (now annual) Facebook Hacker Cup. Get your coke, beer or even glas of redwine next to you, arrange some brain-food and get in a relaxed postion. There will be some code to be written in the next weeks. That’s a challenge all AI-Class Students shall be interested in.

If you are willing to submit your solutions to different hacking problems, you may qualify for the first of three online rounds. The competition commences with a 72-hour Qualification Round on January 20, 2012 at 4:00 PM PT and ends on January 23, 2012 at 4:00 PM PT. You will be presented with three problems and if you correctly solves at least one problem, you will advance to Online Round 1. All online Rounds will be occuring in January 2012 with world finals held at Facebook’s headquarters in California, registration started January 4, 2012.

Facebook will pay to fly and accommodate the top 25 hackers from the third online round out to their californian campus and there is more to win:

$5,000 USD and title as world champion to the top hacker
$2,000 for second place
$1,000 for third
$100 for fourth through 25th
Awesome t-shirts for the top 100 hackers coming out of the second online round

“Going viral”.. one of the most important term in marketing nowadays. Designers, Bloggers, Marketers and Entertainment producers are working hard to create viral content. Unfortunately, there is no death proof recipe for going viral. Voltierdigital.com now compile it’s research results into an awesome infographic called Understanding Viral Content Marketing.

Even if you can’t guarantee virality, understanding the key components of what makes content go viral can help you ensure that your great content gets “the attention it deserves.”

Viral content relies on two things. The content itself is worthy of being shared the content and is shared widely enough to reap the benefits of the networks they are shared on. If your content is not worthy of being shared then it won’t go viral.

Check out the fantastic infographic below to learn more about what it takes to go viral.